I want the Marshmallow Shooter, a pump-action rifle ($24 from the Hammacher Schlemmer Christmas catalog) that shoots, get this, marshmallows at friends who might enjoy having sweet morsels hit them in the face.

For $189, the catalog has a voice-activated R2-D2 and, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, an $89 stainless steel wallet “with a strength that surpasses leather.”

Well, yeah. But that’s not the point. Nor is the point my dream gift, the World’s Best Prelit Fraser Fir, a faux X-Mas tree that arrives decorated and ready to plug in.

This I found in the pages of the nation’s oldest surviving paper-and-postage mail-order catalog, one started in New York by Alfred Hammacher back in 1848. According to the the National Mail Order Association, the original Hammacher catalog pitched tools under the heading, “The Best, The Only, The Unexpected.”

I get this wonderful catalog in the mail every year and every year I find myself hungering for nonessentials such as the pocket-size germ-eliminating light, a device said to kill 99.9 percent of all bacteria and viruses.

But that’s not the point either. Though the Circulation Enhancing Travel Socks, the Bavarian Zipfel Bobsled and the Remote Controlled Tarantula are wonderful gift ideas even though the $29.95 spider can’t be employed to kill enemies.

And that is the point. Or at least it’s getting close to the point, which is how these things awaken in me each year a latent case of consumer greed, of stuff- envy, of sheer acquisitiveness that is part of every American’s core values.

I’m talking Republicans, Democrats and tea party protesters alike. If you think that a plea to keep on shopping originated with GW after 9-11, think again. I just finished reading a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, a man who realized in his second term that the Great Depression wasn’t going anywhere until Americans stopped being depressed and started shopping.

What he suggested was tantamount to a new American motto. Instead of “In God We Trust” it was suddenly “Buy Stuff!” Or at least that’s how I read FDR’s consumerist plea.

Shopping meant, and still means, jobs up and down the food chain. And nothing in my youth symbolized holiday shopping more than mail-order catalogs, a concept that may have started, states the NMOA, with Benjamin Franklin who, in 1744, started selling books by post.

These he offered with a most L.L. Bean sounding guarantee: “Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to B. Franklin may depend on the same justice as if present.”

But it was Aaron Montgomery Ward (it’s not two people after all) who in 1872 produced the first real mail-order catalog in the form of a one-sheet offering of then scarce goods.

Ten years later, Ward was pushing 20,000 items in a 540-page book of dreams. The Sears catalog soon joined in, followed by JCPenney and Spiegel, as fixtures in American outhouses and living rooms.

Until the widespread building of shopping malls killed off limited-choice main streets, such catalogs were often the only window most Americans – especially rural Americans – had on a wider world of consumer goods and all that those goods promised.

These were phone-book-size compilations and I’m not sure that any American kid of a certain age didn’t feel the first vibrations of approaching Christmas in the four-color pages of a catalog toy section.

It was love at first sight with the trucks and dolls and, later, the camping gear and hunting supplies. And, later still, the underwear section where square-jawed men stood pipe-smoking in long johns while fulsome women posed in undergarments that were marvels of industrial-grade elastic and metal.

There was an education to be had in these catalogs and trouble, too, like in fourth grade when a nun caught Franny Puglese and me marveling at pictures of the least risque undies ever torn from the pages of a Monkey Wards catalog.

What the arresting nun didn’t know was that Franny and I weren’t discussing the “how” of talking a female out of those double-stitched garments. We were discussing the still unfathomable “why.” By the time the “why” was finally revealed to us – thank God and the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog – the girl flesh was no longer encased like pork sausage.

Sure, I shop online. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss the catalogs that were, only a few years ago, pouring into my mailbox 10 per day like colorful birds come to remind me of life’s endless buying opportunities.

Front Gate, The Company Store, L.L. Bean and Brookstone still have me on their lists. And I have to acknowledge that they sorely tempt me to buy the plush blankets with arms, the slippers made of NapForm memory material, the goose down quilts and Nordic parkas, the nose hair clippers, the pedal-powered $3,5000 “Ferrari” bicycle and mega-kitchen equipment that would come in handy should 200 friends drop by for drinks.

Times change. Most retail stores, even small ones, now do mail order. Even, and this broke my heart, the ridiculously upscale Bloomingdale’s catalog is now an upscale Web site with no sign that anybody plans to re-embrace the era of paper and postage.

Which is good for the environment and for a nation that actually needs to follow FDR’s advice this Christmas. Still, I read my thin catalogs from cover to paper cover and now have my eye on a chrome shower squeegee and a trim little bed for Jack, my pointer dog.

Like his owner, Jack finds comfort in the things that hold us to the earth.

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